Saturday, November 9, 2013

Ethical Perspectives of Life Extension

Hundreds of thousands of people die in the
world every day, two-thirds of them from ageing. Is this just life, the way
things must be, or is it a problem to be solved? If, as the western tradition
teaches, every human life is valuable in and of itself, shouldn't we be doing
more to stop this appalling carnage?

(From
The Sunday Times, "I'm going to live forever", March 13, 2005.)

So far as we know, the last hundred years have been the most
radical period of life extension in all of human history. Life expectancy at
birth in this country at the turn of the 20th century was nearly 50 years.
According to the United States Census Bureau, it’s now over 78. And by 2050,
it’ll be over 80. Others estimate it could be even higher. A 2009
report by the MacArthur Research Network on an Aging Society estimated
that by 2050 “life expectancy for females will rise to 89.2-93.3 years and to
83.2-85.9 years for males”, mostly on account of improved sanitation and basic
medicine. But life extension doesn't always increase our well-being, especially
when all that's being extended is decrepitude. There's a reason that Ponce de
Leon went searching for the fountain of youth---if it were the fountain of
prolonged dementia and arthritis he may not have bothered.

Over the past twenty years, biologists have begun to set
their sights on the aging process itself, in part by paying close attention to
species like the American Lobster, which, despite living as long as fifty
years, doesn't seem to age much at all. Though some of this research has shown
promise, it's not as though we're on the brink of developing a magical youth
potion. Because aging is so biologically complex, encompassing hundreds of
different processes, it's unlikely that any one technique will add decades of
youth to our lives. Rather, the best we can hope for is a slow, incremental
lengthening of our "youth-span," the alert and active period of our
lives.

Not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of radical life
extension. As funding for anti-aging research has exploded, bioethicists
have expressed alarm, reasoning that extreme longevity could have
disastrous social effects. Some argue that longer life spans will mean stiffer competition
for resources, or a wider gap between rich and poor. Others insist that the
aging process is important because it gives death a kind of time release
effect, which eases us into accepting it. These concerns are well founded. Life
spans of several hundred years are bound to be socially disruptive in one way
or another; if we're headed in that direction, it's best to start teasing out
the difficulties now.

But there is another, deeper argument against life
extension---the argument from evolution. Its proponents suggest that we ought
to avoid tinkering with any human trait borne of natural selection.
Doing so, they argue, could have unforeseen consequences, especially given that
natural selection has such a sterling engineering track record. If our bodies
grow old and die, the thinking goes, then there must be a good reason, even if
we don't understand it yet. Nonsense, says Bennett Foddy, a philosopher from
Oxford, who has written extensively about the ethics of life
extension. "We think about aging as being a natural human trait, and it is
natural, but it's not something that was selected for because it was beneficial
to us. There is this misconception that everything evolution provides is
beneficial to individuals and that's not correct."

Due to the lack of consensus among experts, and in spite of
the fact that many scientists state that life extension and radical life
extension are possible, there are still no international or national programs
focused on radical life extension. There are political forces staying for and
against life extension. In 2012 in Russia, and then in USA, Israel and
Netherlands the Longevity political parties started. They aimed to provide
political support to radical life extension research and technologies and
ensure fastest possible and at the same time soft transition society to the
next step - life without aging and with radical life extension and provide such
the access to such technologies to the most of the currently living people.

Leon Kass, a prominent bioconservative ethicist, and chairman
of the US President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005 has questioned
whether potential exacerbation of overpopulation problems would make life
extension unethical. He states his opposition to life extension with the words:
"Simply to covet a prolonged life span for ourselves is both a sign and a
cause of our failure to open ourselves to procreation and to any higher purpose
... [The] desire to prolong youthfulness is not only a childish desire to eat
one's life and keep it; it is also an expression of a childish and narcissistic
wish incompatible with devotion to posterity."

Kass is not the only commentator who has criticized
prolongevity on ethical grounds. Another is Audrey Chapman. Chapman worries
about the justice implications of investing in the quest for longer lifespan:
isn’t it wrong to spend money on studying aging in a world where many people
lack access to clean drinking water and basic health care?

Opponents of prolongevity, however, fail to offer a
convincing explanation of why it would be ethically acceptable for society to
be spending vast amounts on researching and curing particular diseases in an
effort to extend healthy life for people in rich countries and yet unacceptable
to conduct research into the biology of aging in order to develop more
effective interventions to achieve the same aim.

Another problem for the justice objection to life-extension
research is that one could argue in reply that if we want to do more to help
the poor, we should surely sacrifice some less essential form of consumption
rather than forego potentially lifesaving medical or biogerontological
advances. It is unclear why aging research should be singled out for blame or
special concern in this regard. Many factors contribute to global inequality,
and spending on gerontological research is such a minute fraction of the
financial outlays of wealthy nations that it seems a bizarre place to look for
savings to transfer to the poor.

For the most part, however, the critics’ concern is not so
much the money we spend on aging research but rather the consequences if this
research should succeed in extending healthspan. Some commentators have worried
that longer healthy lifespans for people in the rich world would lead to
increased pressure on the environment or, alternatively, that it would be
intrinsically unfair for some people to live much longer than others. It is
worth noting that this objection presupposes that biogerontology is a more
effective means to extending healthy life span than are other kinds of medical
research. If it weren’t more effective, then the objectors ought to favor
focusing health care funding on biogerontology on grounds that this would be
less likely to produce what they maintain is a negative outcome, i.e. longer
healthspan for people in developed counties. In other words, those who believe
that longer healthspan would be on balance bad should, in order to be
consistent, prefer that money earmarked for medical research go to those
research projects that are least likely to succeed in lengthening healthspan.

John Harris, former editor-in-chief of the Journal of
Medical Ethics, argues that as long as life is worth living, according to the
person himself, we have a powerful moral imperative to save the life and thus
to develop and offer life extension therapies to those who want them.

Transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom has argued that any
technological advances in life extension must be equitably distributed and not
restricted to a privileged few. In an extended metaphor entitled "The
Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant", Bostrom envisions death as a monstrous dragon
who demands human sacrifices. In the fable, after a lengthy debate between
those who believe the dragon is a fact of life and those who believe the dragon
can and should be destroyed, the dragon is finally killed. Bostrom argues that
political inaction allowed many preventable human deaths to occur.